The €5,000 prize has been presented annually for the past seven years for the best single volume published in the previous 12 months. The winner will be announced in The Irish Times on Saturday, September 8th, and an award ceremony will be held at this year’s Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Mountains to Sea book festival, which runs from September 4th to 9th. The competition judges are poets James Harpur, Mary Shine Thompson and Gerald Dawe.

“The Irish Times dlr Poetry Now Award is a unique prize in Irish poetry,” said Paul Perry, the curator of the award. “We’re delighted to announce the 2012 shortlist, which showcases the finest poetry collections of the last year. Congratulations to the five poets and their publishers. A sincere thank you to The Irish Times for its continued support of the award. And thank you to our judges too. We look forward to hearing their final decision.”